The networked computing environment (e.g., cloud computing environment) is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further enhanced by one or more additional abstraction layers (e.g., a cloud layer), thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, storage devices, among others.
Cloud computing services are typically rendered within a relatively static hardware pool whereby operating systems and applications are deployed and reconfigured to meet the computational demands of consumers. Within the cloud environment's boundaries, application images can be installed and overwritten, Internet Protocol (IP) addresses may be modified, and real and virtual processors may be allocated to meet changing business needs. Presently, different cloud service providers may take varying amounts of time to provision virtual machines requested by consumers. For example, some cloud providers may provision a particular resource in a matter of seconds, while others may take hours. The differences in provisioning speeds are generally caused by at least three factors: the type of storage architecture, the architecture of the cloud management platform, and/or the methods used to provision resources. As such, challenges can exist in providing consistent and reliable computing resource provisioning times.